During the lead-up to publication, Angilee Shah,
who co-edited the volume with me, has been doing short interviews with
the contributors to this book, who range from acclaimed journalists
(e.g., Ian Johnson, Evan Osnos, Leslie T. Chang, and Christina Larson), to a blogger and short story writer (Xujun Eberlein), to several academics writing in a jargon-free and footnote-free style.

We have been posting these interviews on the book's Tumblr page -- a site that also keeps visitors up-to-date on interesting news relating to China and will give details on Chinese Characters
book launch events, such as the one that will be held at the Asia
Society in New York on September 17, and related panels, such as a September 18 one that will take place at Harvard.

Below are the answers that Peter Hessler, one of
the most important and insightful contemporary English language writers
on China, gave to Angilee's questions.

Tell me about the first time you went to China.

I first went to China in 1994, after finishing two years of graduate
school at Oxford. I had studied English language and literature, which I
enjoyed, but I realized that I wanted to do something different with my
career. I knew that I wanted to write but I wasn't sure how or where.
And I had long considered joining the Peace Corps -- I first applied
during college, and I was on track to go to Africa as a teacher when I
got a fellowship to Oxford. So I cancelled that first Peace Corps
application and went to England.

After Oxford, I started to think about teaching again. I wanted to go
someplace where I could teach, learn a language, and hopefully develop
as a writer. But I hadn't seen much of the world, so I decided to return
home from Oxford in the opposite direction. I bought a one-way plane
ticket to Prague and from there I traveled east, more or less. I was
with a friend and we didn't have any schedule; we never did any planning
in advance. We spent a couple of weeks in Eastern Europe and then we
went by train into Belarus and Russia. I remember that in Moscow it took
us about three days to find the room in the train station that sold
trans-Siberian tickets to China. I really had no interest in China
itself. I wanted to take that train, and I wanted to pass through
Mongolia, and unfortunately China was the only terminus. I had heard
mostly bad things about China from other travelers. I figured I'd spend
as little time as possible there and continue on to southeastern Asia,
which sounded more appealing. In those days China wasn't yet seen as a
place where so much was changing. The popular image was still very much
connected to the Tiananmen protests and crackdown.

When I look back at that train journey, it's amazing how many traders
were bringing things into China. There were all sorts of guys who
showed up on the train with huge bags of stuff, a really strange
assortment. There was one trader who was carrying dozens of talking
digital alarm clocks -- I don't know why these were headed to China,
since the clocks spoke in Russian. Another trader had a big bag of
speedometers bound for Mongolia. Why would you need speedometers in
Mongolia? These were the mysteries of the trans-Siberian train. There
were so many people with clothes -- nowadays it seems impossible that
people were importing clothes from Moscow to Beijing. Coals to
Newcastle.

The scene on the train was really crazy; we saw one guy give a few
hundred dollars to the attendant, and then they took out a hacksaw and
sawed a hole in the ceiling panel, so the passenger could hide his bags
inside. There was a lot of maneuvering of goods as we approached the
customs station at the Mongolian border. In the end, the only guy who
got fined was the one with the speedometers. I had no idea why this
happened; none of these traders had much English. Apart from a few
backpackers, the only passengers who spoke the language well were a pair
of North Korean diplomats heading back to Pyongyang. But it was
impossible to have a conversation with those guys. They talked
constantly about politics and how great North Korea was, and then one of
them groped a couple of female travelers, so we all steered clear. It
took five days to reach the Russian border, where they still used the
CCCP stamp on our passports, as if the news of the regime's collapse
hadn't made it out to the hinterlands.

After this long and strange trip, Beijing was a revelation. There was
so much energy in the city; it was clear that something significant was
happening in this country. My friend and I spent about a week there,
mostly riding around on rented bikes. And we ended up traveling in China
for about six weeks; it just seemed much more interesting than I had
expected. We also spent a couple of weeks in Hong Kong, because we had
to wait for a visa to Vietnam, which took a lot of time in those days.
We had a lot of dead time so we found work playing foreigners in a Hong
Kong soap opera and movie. I have no idea what the titles were; I played
a businessman in the soap and a shop owner in the movie. We even
auditioned for a Disney Vietnam war movie called Operation Dumbo Drop.
My friend actually did well in the auditions and made it to the last
round, when the casting director flew in. They were going to film in
Thailand and they needed white people to play soldiers. I didn't come
very close to making it in the Disney movie. We had gone around to
various Hong Kong casting agencies and lied about our acting experience.
On the applications forms I wrote "I played Hamlet at Oxford," which
wasn't true, although I had read the play a couple of times. My friend
always wrote, "In my country I am considered very attractive."

In the end, I spent six months traveling, and I went all the way from
Prague to the Gulf of Thailand without flying. It was so cheap --
including the plane ticket home to the States, I spent a little more
than three thousand dollars. The conditions were usually very rough. But
it was a good way to see some of the world and it gave me time to think
about where I wanted to be. And by the time I returned home I knew that
I wanted to go to China. It seemed so fascinating -- a world of its own.
And there was a clear energy to the place, a sense that things were
changing.

So I re-applied to the Peace Corps, which had a new China program.
They sent me there in 1996, and I ended up living in the country until
2007, and I wrote three books about it. When I look back, it's amazing
how happenstance it all was, and also how direct. I never took a course
on China or studied the language outside of the country. I basically
never thought about the place until I showed up in Beijing in 1994. But
once I was there, the contact was very intense. During my two years
teaching in the Peace Corps, the biggest city I visited was Xi'an, and I
didn't leave the country during that period. There was something
transformative about that experience; it was more like a conversion than
a visit or a two-year hiatus. By the end of my Peace Corps years, I was
a writer, and I had also found myself fully subsumed into this world of
China.

What was the most interesting thing you learned from working on your chapter for Chinese Characters?

This story came out of my last long research project in China. After
spending about eight years in the country, I realized that the time had
come to shift to other places and other topics. I was concerned about
writing only about China -- I felt like I needed to explore other parts
of the world, and I wanted to develop other skills as a writer. So I
decided to do one final China project, a big one, and then I would
leave.

I had spent some time in the factory region of Shenzhen, where I researched a long piece for the New Yorker
between the years of 1999 and 2001. But since then I had worked on
other topics, and now I realized that it was time to focus once more on a
factory town. Journalists don't tend to spend enough time in those
places; it can be hard work, because it takes time, and it's not always
such a dramatic story. Also, most of us are based in Beijing, which is
relatively far from the intensely developing industrial regions. So I
decided that I wanted to improve my knowledge of that side of China. I
flew to Wenzhou and rented a car, and I drove around southern Zhejiang
province for two weeks. I visited towns and talked to people, and I
thought about which places might be interesting for long-term research.
At the end of that trip, I decided to focus on Lishui. It was relatively
undeveloped, at least by Zhejiang standards, but they were finishing a
new highway and a new factory district. I could tell that things would
be happening in Lishui.

About a month and a half later, I returned for another two-week trip
that would be focused on Lishui. Again, I kept things as open as
possible. In China I never liked having a focused idea at the start of
my research, and in particular I wanted my last big project to be as
organic as possible. So I talked to all kinds of people in Lishui --
construction workers, shop owners, factory workers, government cadres,
entrepreneurs. Usually I just wandered around on foot and talked to
people. I never hired a translator or a researcher for this project; I
wanted to be able to review all the possibilities myself. At the end of
those two weeks, I had some ideas of things that would be interesting.
And then I kept coming back. I would visit Lishui roughly every month;
I'd fly down there and stay in a hotel where I worked out a special
rate. There was an assistant manager at the hotel who would loan me his
refrigerator whenever I was in town. I joined a local gym that was
called "The Scent of a Woman." And I kept working at a slow pace; over
time, I found certain people and places that interested me, and I
revisited them and learned their stories. In the end, I pursued this
project for more than two years. When it was over I did a count and
realized that I had spent nearly one hundred days on the ground in
Lishui.

This was initially for a National Geographic story called
"Instant Cities." And I suppose this was not a smart investment of time
for one piece. But I ended up also writing this story, "Chinese
Barbizon," and I wrote about Lishui in the last part of my third book.
It was my favorite research experience in China. I felt like I was
applying everything I had learned in the decade that I had lived in the
country. And it taught me so much. That's always true in China -- no
matter how long you've lived there, and how much work you've done, there
are still endless things to learn. I was happy to leave the country on
those terms. Over the course of a decade, I had learned so much in
places like Lishui. But there were still so many mysteries, so many
things I hadn't touched -- China remained a world of its own, the same
way it had felt when I first arrived in 1994.

Where are you right now and what are you working on?

I now live in Cairo, Egypt. I'm studying Arabic and beginning to
write about this place. In a sense, I've started over -- a new world to
explore.

This article originally appeared at Asia Society, an Atlantic partner site.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom teaches at UC Irvine and is working on a book with the provisional title of “Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1984: A Prophetic Book, a Pivotal Year, and the Road to the 21st Century.”